Well, as of now, Trump has been our president for about a month. It is a troublesome but undeniable fact. I know that there are some who think that Trump deserves a chance, that he might be good for the country. If this past month has been any indication, things are only going to get worse. We need to deal with Donald Trump, our so-called president, directly. But he isn’t really the disease that has infected America. He is the flowering fruit of it. Planted in fetid, contaminated soil.

Trump didn’t elect himself president. He ran for election the correct way, just like everybody else. Trump lost the popular vote by millions, but he did get a lot of votes, and he did win the Electoral College. But the methods he used to beat his opponents in both the primary and general were disgusting. He showed us who he was every time he opened his mouth. One of the few largely true things Trump has said since his election is that he is doing what he said he would do. Yes, he is, but with at least one glaring exception.  One thing he said he would do that he hasn’t done is to “drain the swamp”. He is actually creating his own swamp of billionaires and Wall Street executives. That, to me, is the least of the bad things he has done. But it is something that he campaigned against. He wasn’t supposed to cozy up to Wall Street. So in that respect, he did do a bait-and-switch.

The real problem, in my opinion, is the millions of people who bought and are still buying President Trump’s con. Full disclosure: I have a close friend, probably my closest non-related friend, who is a lukewarm Trump supporter. I will call him “Lemuel”. Let me qualify that by saying that he didn’t actually vote. Not that it would have mattered if he did; our state was going to Clinton regardless, due to our Electoral College system. My friend was an Obama supporter during his presidency. We were having coffee, and I casually asked him if he voted, and if so, for whom. When he answered, he had a look in his eye that said that he knew I wouldn’t approve. Our friendship has never been based on politics; in fact, except for his disappointment with his Republican brother-in-law’s right-wing politics, he has never discussed it. I would classify Lemuel as a low-information voter. That is, if he had voted. I showed him a cell phone picture of an anti-Trump headline as we were having coffee. He looked at it, and he said “Trump was the candidate for change, right?” I nodded yes. “The other one was going to keep things pretty much the same”. I had to nod yes. Hillary rode Obama’s coattails as much as she could, and she was promising to build on what Obama had done. So that’s it. If he voted, he would have picked Trump. And Lemuel had been an Obama supporter. Truthfully, if I thought Lemuel really knew what he was advocating, our friendship would have taken a hit, maybe a fatal one. As it is, I am bothered by it, but I’m sure that he is so uninformed that he just doesn’t know who Trump really is. And that makes me wonder how many other people thought just like my best friend, only they did make that trip to town hall or the local school to cast their vote. Lemuel is a white man, my age (early 60s), and he is self-employed. He used to be covered by his wife’s insurance, but she reached Medicare eligibility age, so he had to buy his own policy. His individual policy, which was expensive last year when he bought it, almost doubled in price this year. This might have something to do with my friend’s favor of Trump, in that he blames the status quo for his situation.

Change for change’s sake is never a good thing. Changing from something bad to something better, or from something good to something even better, is a good thing. The kind of change that Lemuel and millions of other Americans wanted is going very badly so far, and I don’t see it getting any better. The Russian chickens are coming home to roost. I have thought, from the start, that Trump would not finish his first term. But I didn’t think that he would come out of the gate and jump into Nixonian-size troubles. It was well into Nixon’s presidency when Watergate broke, and very well into his long political career. Trump has set a speed record in the political world for hitting a jackpot of trouble.

Which brings me back to my title. The problem here isn’t Donald Trump. He is a major symptom of the problem, but he isn’t the problem. The problem is the vast ignorance of Americans, both voters and non-voters. Like my friend Lemuel. He has a problem with his health insurance. That is because of Republican obstruction of a single-payer health care system, which everybody knows by now is what every other developed country in the world has. Republicans are very good at shifting blame. Fox News and the rise of Internet right-wing conspiracy theorist websites, along with the long-lasting tenure of right-wing AM radio talk shows have played a part in this. Confirmation bias is rampant, since people have the choice of only hearing what they want to hear.

And I just have to say, in the final analysis, there is no cure for stupid. If you can’t judge the level of probity between an award-winning news organization and an in-your-face conspiracy website, well, I guess that about says it all.

I have been spending much of the time since I retired in the summer of 2015 preoccupied with politics. I was rooting for Hillary. I, and most of the people who were paying attention, was sure that she would win. So I spent much of my time, I hesitate to say wasted, fighting Bernie Sanders. I say I was sure she would win, but I wasn’t absolutely sure. Ninety percent, maybe. I saw Bernie Sanders’ left wing populism as the major threat to Hillary. I saw Sanders as a fraud. I saw him as a person who knew how to whip up the crowd by telling them what they want to hear, but rather short on how his ideas could work in the real world. I thought of his supporters as either naïve or outright stupid, as well as angry and willing to torpedo the ship in order to save it. I still think Sanders is a charlatan, an old-time medicine show traveling to college campuses and deceiving people with his easy promises, pie in the sky falsehoods. I use that word deliberately, because it isn’t clear to me if his intent was to deceive, or if he was just pushing the envelope with extreme optimism. I am not calling Bernie a liar.

Needless to say at this point, I was misdirecting my anger. There was a big orange globe rising in the sky like a malevolent sun. By the time I was aware of how much trouble we were in, it was too late. A bunch of yahoos in the Midwestern swing states decided the election through the ancient artifact we use to elect presidents called the Electoral College.

Now I see things much more clearly. Everybody who is politically aware knows what happened. My preferred candidate did in fact win by a sizable margin. The only trouble is, she won the popular vote and not the Electoral College, where the aforementioned yahoos held sway. The FBI and the Russians, with some help from Bernie Sanders, destroyed my candidate.

I hear so much nowadays about “flyover country” and “coastal elites”. The idea is that the elites are out of touch with “real America”. I call bull on that one. If, by elite, you mean aware, intelligent, rational, some highly educated, some in the film industry, some regular joes with a high school diploma like me, I appreciate the compliment. It’s a false argument, however. Being smart and living in the real world isn’t being elite. It’s being a more astute, aware, discriminating person. Someone able to separate false information from real information. Someone able to tell truth from lies. Somebody who is able to spot a dangerous con artist. Elitism isn’t the problem. Gullibility on the part of those who voted for the wealthy scam artist is the problem.

As I said above, I call Bernie Sanders a purveyor of falsehoods and socialist fantasies. I don’t call him a liar, because I don’t know what his intent is. On the other hand, I know perfectly well what our president’s intent is. Donald J. Trump is a liar. It’s so obvious that I won’t even waste my time showing evidence. Everybody knows that he is a liar. Maybe not everybody, maybe just the elites. Nevertheless, he is a stone liar. He is an existential danger to the world.

What I am doing is trying to detach from the situation with our dangerous president. It doesn’t mean that I don’t care, that I won’t keep contributing to worthwhile causes involved in resisting our dangerous leader. It just means that I can’t do anything about it. I didn’t start it, can’t stop it, can’t cure it. I can be part of the solution, but by myself, I am powerless over the situation. So detachment in this case means being realistic about my own power and its limitations, as well as my own innocence in the matter. I didn’t vote for the man.

I’m just enjoying my early retirement, looking forward to the springtime and motorcycle season, and living the dream. Donald Trump can’t disturb me unless I let him.